Spring on the Tower Road

Last night on the road to Tower, the woods were in first bud and the afternoon after a week of rain was light with newness and freshness. On the roadside were the reddish rust of new maple leaves, the old rose of wing petals of the seeds already fast forming and in with them were the new shiny leaves of Balm of Gilead and the pearl gray of the large tooth aspen.

It was the aspen and the maple that made the striking combination. For I thought of the south with its dogwood and red bud, the striking combinations of red and white that cover the hillsides in the spring, and as I went along I felt badly because there was nothing like that here in the north. But as I saw the pearl gray of the aspen, great masses of it on the hillsides, and then against it the soft rose of the maples both in the leaf and in the bud, and I knew then that in its way it was as beautiful--perhaps not as lasting, but in its briefness more beautiful--as the other, and I was vindicated again in my belief that nothing there but can be duplicated in a finer way here in the north.

And I also knew that beauty is always there for the finding if we know what to look for. I saw a clump of plum blossoms, snowy white, peaking out from a dense hedge of balsam, silhouetted perfectly against the dark green of the evergreen. There were also great masses of bloom on the hillsides, masses backed by the nile green of the aspen, quaking aspen coming into full leaf, so much bloom that the whole world seemed decked for the festival of spring.

The ash still brooded cold in their swamps--they would wait until all the hilarity was over before overcoming their reticence.

But all the rest of the woods were out--even a scrub oak in rusty leaf, and long catkinsfrom the alders and cottonwoods, the woods dripping in pollen and freshness. That was what I remembered most, the freshness, the feeling as though the world was made anew, as though for a moment it was the incarnation of youth. A bank of old pines gave a note of permanence and solidity while all around them was the newness of spring and surging life.

For a moment, all thought of war was forgotten, and I knew that no matter what happened here or there, spring would always come to the north in the same way, today and a hundred years from today, and men would always get pleasure from its coming.